Magpie’s 9 Hour Pot Roast

In all seriousness, this is the perfect dish for when company is coming, you have no time to cook, but you want one heckuva tasty, large meal at the end of the day. The ingredients aren’t fancy at all, but the taste IS!

Or, you simply want a fabulously tasty roast for yourself. If you want to do a smaller roast, halve the recipe. Easy and done!

This was thrown into the oven at 8 am this past Saturday. I had a photo shoot at 10 am with another fabulous photographer friend of mine, who was going to take pics of the kids and their cousin, then my sister and I were off to Galaxyland for the rest of the day.

And I had 6 adults and 2.5 kids to feed at the end of the day for a birthday party.

Yeeehaw!

This was thrown together with a hope and a prayer whispered to the food gods above, because I had no recipe, nothing to go by. Every recipe I found used mushroom soup and I just wanted a plain gravy by the end.

And I warned everyone that if it didn’t work out, I was ordering Chinese.

See how I was going to use the crockpot? The seven pound roast was too big for it! I had to change plans on the fly. This was going to be a crockpot recipe and now, it is not.

That’s how I roll.

I fly by the seat of my pants most days and never actually know what I am doing.

Look at that huge hunka meat. This roast was a $20 roast. Cheaper than borscht. And if it has lovely marbling like the one below, oh, these cheap roasts become buttah. Buttah I tell you.

Shake the gravy mixes and onion soup mix on top of the roast.

Pour the 3 cups of water over the top. Slice up 2-3 cloves of garlic and scatter on top of the roast.

I’m Ukrainian. Garlic has its place on top of everything.

Wrap the roaster top in tinfoil to keep moisture loss to a minimum. You are going to want to keep all that liquid in.

Then I cooked this 7 lb roast in a 215 degree oven for 9 hours. And it needed every one of those hours. I tested it at 4 o’clock, 8 hours into cooking and internally freaked out that I was ordering take-out after all, it was NOT fall off the bone tender.

And then at 9 hours, it fell off the bone. And I put my Yellow Pages and Visa away.

Remove the roast and cover it in tinfoil.

I didn’t get a full roast picture, oh and I should have. The roast was pulling apart, the long blade bone just literally fell out, what a work of art.

But my family was waiting at the end of a long day for a birthday dinner and it’s amazing that I got the pictures I did!

Now, there is a lot of gravy with this roast, more than you probably need. But a tough roast should be at least halfway covered with liquid and the mixes are mere cents apiece. The gravy works out perfectly this way.

So take the gravy you need and place it in a pot. Skim the fat off the top with a spoon, and here’s another wonderful bonus to the more-than-you-need gravy; it doesn’t matter if you take too much off the top with the fat. I took a LOT off the gravy, as much as I could.

Heat it up till boiling, and add in a couple teaspoons of cold water/cornstarch combo until it’s the thickness you want. It takes very, very little to thicken it just so. It may not even need thickening at all, depending on your preferences.

Serve to a chorus of “amazing” and “wow,can I get this recipe!” and “mmm oh my lord, I love roast beef and it was worth my aching feet taking those wild heathen children around the blasted mall“.

The last one was me. You may or may not hear that at your table.

And to end, my 7 lb roast fed the 6 adults perfectly with enough leftovers for a couple lunches. And unlike most roasts, this one even heated up tender. I was amazed when I warmed it in the microwave and it was still tender for my lunch on Monday.

This has taken a place in my top 10 recipes for my own personal family cooking, a very hard feat indeed.

I make this roast in the crock pot....use your leftover gravy and meat for vegetable soup. The gravy makes broth magic ....just add canned tomatoes of your choice (I like crushed) and veggies along with some additional broth. I also throw in a handful of instant barley. If you haven't used barley you are missing lots of great health benefits...good for cholesterol..or at least that is what it said on the box!!

I bake, cook, homeschool my two children, develop recipes & author this blog all at home in Edmonton, Alberta Canada, while also working on my first cookbook, all of which should explain my love of fancy cocktails. And bourbon. Always bourbon.